


No Worse Than Before (But Now You Know)

by prepare4trouble



Series: Little By Little [9]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Coming to Terms with Bad News, Dokma Racing, Gen, Heart-to-Heart, Or trying to, Sharing Bad News, Space family, Visually Impaired Ezra Bridger, Zeb's secret waffle stash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-20 12:19:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9490760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prepare4trouble/pseuds/prepare4trouble
Summary: Hera is told a secret that is not easy to hear.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Ah, the title of this one caused us so much trouble. Seriously, by the end of the approximately THREE HOURS it took to decide on one, I was on the verge of calling it "Please suggest a name for my fanfic'. Or maybe something really obvious like "telling Hera".

Hera’s feet slapped on the ground as she hurried back to the Ghost.

It was probably nothing. ‘It didn’t have to be now,’ Kanan had said. That implied that it wasn’t urgent; there had been no need to drop what she was doing, abandon the group of young pilots in the middle of the impromptu starship maintenance talk she had been giving them, drop her tools and get home as soon as possible. She didn’t run. Running would attract attention.

If it wasn’t urgent, why had he called her on the comms system? Why hadn’t he waited until later, over dinner, or when they happened to bump into each other around the base?

Why had he hesitated when she had asked him what it was?

If it involved Kanan and Ezra, it was probably Force stuff. But then, why would he feel the need to tell her about it? And again, why like that? If if wasn’t important, why was he acting as though it was?

 _Nothing’s any worse than it already was._ What did that mean? Just a throwaway comment, or something significant? Had something already been wrong for some time and it had just escaped her notice?

She glanced quickly around her, and finding the area reasonably empty, she increased her pace slightly, to almost a jog.

It was probably nothing, but then, why couldn’t she talk herself out of the feeling of impending doom that had begun the moment she had heard his voice over the radio?

She let herself into the ship and hesitated for a moment, before making her way to the lounge, the most likely location. She guessed right. She hesitated again at the door. The silence in the room was as thick at the syrup Zeb used on his waffles. They sat on the benches around the deactivated holo-table; Kanan’s mask disguised most of his facial expression, but what she could see of it was serious.

Ezra’s hands rested on the surface of the table, clenched so tightly together that the fingers were almost white. His gaze was cast downward, his expression pinched and worried, and he couldn’t quite sit still, as though he wanted to be on the move, pacing the room or perhaps fleeing to another part of the ship. She couldn’t help but think he had deliberately sat down there in an attempt to pin himself in place. Clearly he was nervous about something, but normally when he was that nervous, he was talking: filling the room with endless, pointless chatter. The silence between them was unnerving.

Had he _done_ something? Something that Kanan was making him confess to?

What could it be?

Her mind raced through and instantly dismissed a dozen possibilities, each one worse and more ridiculous than the last. 

Ezra didn’t react to her arrival, clearly too lost in his own thoughts to even notice her. Kanan turned as though to look at her and gave a brief smile that quickly faded back into the tense expression he had been wearing earlier.

She opened her mouth to greet them. “What’s happened?” she heard herself saying instead.

Ezra did look at her then, head jerking up to make eye contact, his eyes wide and panicked for a moment, before turning away. The sick feeling in her stomach grew worse.

Kanan got to his feet and walked toward her. “Nothing’s happened,” he said. He took her by the hand and led her across the room to a seat. She allowed herself to be pulled with no resistance, and sank into the seat across the table from Ezra, who still wouldn’t look at her. She thought she heard an unspoken “yet” at the end of his sentence, but she couldn't be sure.

Kanan sat down again too, next to Ezra, and that thick, cloying silence filled the room again.

She was going to feel so silly when they told her what it was and it really hadn’t been anything to worry about.

She watched as Kanan placed a hand on Ezra’s shoulder. Ezra barely reacted. “Do you want me to…”

Ezra shook his head. “No. I… I can do this.”

It was bad. Suddenly, she just knew. It was something about the way they were acting, their tones of voice, Ezra’s nervousness that suddenly seemed to be more like fear or dread. She didn’t want him to say it; whatever it was, it was going to change everything and she didn’t want to know.

What had he done?

Ezra took a deep breath, she could hear it catch slightly. He stared resolutely at his hands, suddenly still on the tabletop, still squeezed together so tightly he was cutting off the circulation to his fingers.

“I… should have told you sooner,” he said. “I was going to, honestly, when we got back, but then…” Another deep breath.

Kanan’s fingers tightened noticeably on his shoulder and Hera felt herself chewing on her bottom lip. “Whatever it is…” _We’ll support you; it won’t make any difference; we’re still your family._

“The thing is,” Ezra began, still staring down like he couldn’t bring himself to look at her, “I can’t see very well.” He spoke slowly, not in the slow ponderous way of somebody carefully planning their words, but like someone dragging out a sentence that was far too heavy. “It’s… getting worse.”

Hera didn’t understand. She tried and failed to make eye contact with him, looking for something that would provide a clue; Ezra avoided her gaze, turning away just slightly. He took a deep breath.

“And it’s going to keep getting worse,” he added. “Until I… can’t.”

She stared at him searchingly. Until he couldn’t… what? Ezra continued to look down at the table; she was suddenly very aware of his breathing, too deep, too even, as though he were carefully controlling it in an effort to make it appear normal. 

“So, yeah,” he muttered.

Hera reached for him, placing her hand on top of his. She felt his hand twitch as though in surprise, and for the briefest of moments, he looked at her before looking away again. “I’m sorry, Ezra, I don’t understand,” she said. She hated that she had to ask for clarification; forcing out those words had been difficult enough for him, now she was asking him to do it again.

Ezra slumped slightly. Kanan gripped his shoulder again.

“I… It’s like… I’m…” He floundered, then turned to look at Kanan, his expression pleading. Kanan didn’t react. He couldn’t see the request for help, and although she knew that he could sometimes read emotions through the Force, she didn’t really know how sensitive that was to nuances. Ezra had likely been begging for assistance from the beginning of this conversation, despite having said that he didn’t want it.

“Kanan,” she said, prompting him. “He needs help.”

Ezra took another deep breath, and when he didn’t deny the request, Kanan nodded. He remained silent for a moment, as though steeling himself to speak. When he did, it was in a quiet voice, in simple terms with no room for misinterpretation. “He’s trying to tell you he’s going blind.”

At that final word, Ezra flinched visibly with a sharp intake of breath. He pulled back his hand, slipping it out from underneath hers, and folded his arms tightly across his chest as though to make himself as small as possible.

Hera looked from Kanan to Ezra and back again, her mind reeling. It didn’t make any sense. How? Why? There had to be some mistake, or she had misheard, misunderstood. “I don’t… What?”

Kanan faced her, his expression hidden behind the painted eyes of his mask, but she could hear the unspoken words: Please don’t make me say it again.

She wouldn’t. She didn’t want to hear it again either. She turned to Ezra, but the words dried up in her mouth and she couldn’t think of a single thing to say anyway. Silence filled the room again; that same, awful silence as before.

“It’s genetic,” Kanan said, preempting the questions she hadn’t even thought to ask yet. “Sacul Syndrome. It’s not common, and in kids Ezra’s age, it’s practically unheard of, but it happens. It… is happening.”

Hera placed her head in her hands and closed her eyes. She couldn’t process the information, it seemed unreal, impossible. The nightmare scenarios she had had in her mind as she ran there, this had not been one of them. This was so far beyond anything she had been able to dream up. 

She forced open her eyes and looked at Ezra, still apparently trying to make himself as small and unnoticeable as possible. She couldn't move, she could barely bring herself to blink. The thoughts running through her head were an incoherent stream, and she didn’t know what to do.

There was nothing she could do; nothing that could fix this. It was Kanan all over again. It was her mother’s death, it was every terrible thing that had happened to someone she cared about while she had been forced to stand by and watch.

“How long?” she said. “How long before…”

Kanan began to answer, but to her surprise, Ezra beat him to it. “A few years,” he said. His voice sounded wrong, dull, devoid of emotion, as though he were answering by rote “A little more if I’m lucky, but it’s… gonna get bad before then.”

She didn’t ask for clarification, not yet. She could imagine more or less what he meant; it wasn't going to happen overnight, but it was progressive, and sooner or later although he would technically be able to see _something_ it wasn’t going to be anything that he could use.

“Can we do anything to stop it, or slow it, or…” Surgery, implants; there was technology out there that could work miracles, she had seen artificial eyes, limbs, even people that has had most of their bodies replaced with machines, and still carried on, breathing, walking, _seeing_. Ezra was already shaking his head. Kanan was sitting very still next to him, his hand no longer on Ezra’s shoulder.

“Nothing,” Ezra whispered.

Tears began to fill her eyes then. She tried to will them away, but they refused to obey her commands; she blinked to clear her vision, took a deep breath and nodded. She wanted to ask more: for how long would he be able to see in any way that was useful to him? How long had he known? How bad was it right now? How… How did this happen without her noticing? How did this happen at all?

“How did nobody know?” She was speaking more to herself than to either of them, but Ezra replied anyway.

“Chopper knew.”

She turned to look at the droid, who had been in the corner of the room the last she remembered, but he was gone. She remembered then, the tripping; she had wondered about it at the time, why Chopper had suddenly decided it was funny to get underfoot; why Ezra was his only victim. That ended right now. Probably Chopper already knew that, and he was off lamenting the loss of his newest game. He had never mentioned it to anybody, but then, he wouldn’t. Or, maybe Ezra had asked him not to. She didn’t have the energy to ask right now, she was tired. She hadn’t been tired before, but suddenly all she wanted to do was sleep.

She couldn’t do this again. And not with Ezra. It wasn’t fair.

She looked to Kanan, and for a moment she couldn’t see anything but the mask covering his face. He didn’t wear it all the time anymore, and she was certain he had chosen to wear it now for one of two reasons: either to cover his scar in an attempt to prevent her drawing a comparison between himself and Ezra, or to disguise his emotional response to the situation. Either way, he had failed.

She got to her feet and walked quickly across the room and back; moving helped. There was something about being in motion, it gave her something to do, something else to focus on, even if it was something as simple as the act of putting one foot in front of the other. She turned, and saw them both, Ezra’s expression a combination of misery and terror, both badly disguised. She moved back toward him quickly, and put her arms around him.

Ezra tensed in surprise, as though he hadn’t anticipated that reaction. Surely his eyes weren’t so bad already that… no, of course not. His mind was elsewhere, and he hadn’t even been looking in her direction. But soon, one day soon, he wouldn’t…

He relaxed into her embrace and put his arms around her too. She could feel the tears prickling the corners of her eyes again; she ignored them this time, putting all of her concentration into holding Ezra, making him aware that he wasn't alone; that he never would be. No matter what happened, she… they all… would be there for him. She felt her breath hitch and Ezra held her a little tighter.

“It’s going to be okay,” he whispered.

No, that wasn’t right. Ezra wasn’t supposed to be the one taking care of her. She nodded, her head against his so that she knew he would feel the motion. It was something she did with Kanan, and she repeated the action here, simply because it was easier than pulling away. “I know.” She held him a little tighter. “I know.” But… was it? She slowly released him and sat back down opposite, with Kanan sandwiched between the two of them.

She looked at Kanan; her best friend, her confidante, the person she trusted more than anyone else in the world. He had known. He had spoken about it; not in so many words, but he had spoken about it; about a person with a secret. He had known and he hadn’t told her. She wanted to confront him about that, but she couldn’t, not now, and not in front of Ezra. Not while Kanan himself looked so… lost. What must this be like for him? Having gone through it, or something similar, himself only months earlier. He knew exactly the road down which Ezra would have to travel, he knew how difficult it could be, and to have to help somebody else, somebody that he cared about, embark on that same journey…

At least Ezra wouldn’t be in pain. Or, not physical pain, at the very least. She thought of those long nights with Kanan as he tried not to show her the pain that he was in as the burn healed agonizingly slowly, even with the bacta and the painkillers; that kind of injury didn’t heal fast, and the scars it left weren't all physical.

She turned back to Ezra. “Are you…” she stopped. Ezra was gone. She blinked, looked around the room, but there was no sign of him; she and Kanan were alone in the room. “Where’s he gone?” she asked.

Kanan started slightly, then moved for the first time in quite some time. He shook his head. “I…” he paused, ‘looking’ around. “He’s heading for his quarters,” he said.

Hera frowned. Kanan hadn’t noticed him leaving either. It was hard to get anything past Kanan; it was a measure of how distracted he was that he had allowed that to happen. She didn’t mention it. Instead, finally alone, she moved a little closer and rested her head on his shoulder. She closed her eyes; all she wanted to do was sleep, wake up the next morning and discover that it had been a terrible dream.

Kanan’s arms closed around her, gently enveloping her, lending her his strength and she relaxed into the embrace.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She opened her mouth to answer, but her throat seized and no sound came out. She nodded instead, head against his shoulder, then swallowed and tried again. “Are you?”

He didn’t answer. Of course he wasn’t. Nobody was.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “How does something like this happen? How did we not notice?” She was going to kill Chopper. Actually dismantle him and use him for spare parts. Well, no, she wasn’t. But they were going to have serious words.

Kanan shook his head. “It’s gradual,” he said. He released her from the embrace, but left an arm around her shoulders. He sat with his face cast down to the table before them. “It’s only recently started to become a problem for him. And you know what it’s like with secrets; you keep one for long enough, avoid thinking about it, put it away in a box and don’t open it, and after a while you can almost convince yourself it’s not there.”

“But… all that time.” Hera sighed deeply. “He was dealing with it alone for all that time.”

“And now he isn’t,” Kanan told her. “Now he has us.”

She rested her face in her hands. “It’s so unfair,” she said. “He’s a kid. He’s just…” Her hands clenched in frustrated anger.

“I know.” In lieu of eye contact, he reached for her hands and squeezed them gently. “I know. Give it time, okay? It’s raw, you’re still processing.”

She exhaled through pursed lips and a fresh wave of tears spilled from her eyes. One hit the table with an audible sound. “How long have you known?” she asked.

“Less than a week,” he told her.

“This was what you couldn’t tell me the other night, wasn’t it?” She resisted the urge to thump him. “How could you do that to me? How could you sit there and talk about it, let me advise you to forget about it, knowing what it was; _who_ it was?”

Kanan sighed. He caressed her fingers carefully, gently, soothingly. It didn’t help anything. “It wasn’t my secret to tell,” he said.

And that was true, but it still hurt. She sighed. “You’re sure there’s nothing we can do?”

“To stop it, no.” He paused. “But there are things we can do to help. Top of the list…” He brushed the thumb of one hand lightly over her cheek and wiped away the tears. “It won’t help,” he said. He forced a smile. “Anyway, should I be offended? You never cried about me, you were all business; retrofitting equipment on the Ghost, trying to convince me to eat and get out of bed, and all that important stuff.”

Hera smiled. “I never cried _in front_ of you,” she corrected. “But you’re right, half the ship is already accessible, that’ll help. We might need to make some adjustments to his quarters, maybe think about some of the equipment he uses that you don’t. You’ll be able to teach him a lot too, and he has time to learn. It should be easier for…” She stopped as a fresh wave of tears threatened to overwhelm her. It wasn’t going to be easy for anybody, least of all Ezra. She forced them back and swiped at her eyes angrily. “Okay,” she said. “What can I do to help?”

Kanan shook his head. “I don’t… we’re still figuring it out. For now, his sight’s not… I mean, it’s hard for me to… I think he’s mostly okay when it’s light, it’s when it starts to get dark he has problems, but from what I understand, his side vision’s closing in, and I think he’s already having trouble with small things, reading, maybe? That’s why he thought he needed lenses. You might be able to get a better understanding of that, if you can talk to him about it, because you can see what he’s looking at, and know what he _should_ be able to see compared to what he can.”

That was going to be a difficult conversation, but he was right, and it was something that they would need to do.

“Maybe there’s something I could read, something with information, what to expect, what we can do to help… things Ezra might not know.”

Kanan’s mouth twitched a little at one side, as though in amusement. She frowned.

“What?”

“The med droid, Enno-fifteen…”

“The same one that treated you.” It made sense, because Kanan was blind now, and soon Ezra… she stopped the thought in its tracks. “What about it?”

Kanan’s smile widened slightly. “He’s… let’s say, a little too enthusiastic about his work. He’s given Ezra some light reading material.”

Hera frowned, wondering whether she was going to be let in on the joke.

“He didn’t want them,” Kanan continued. “Said he knew it all already, so I took them, but they’re not much use to me.” He reached for a large bag on the floor by his feet. She hadn’t noticed it until now, too involved in absorbing the information that she was hearing. He opened the drawstring on the bag and pulled out a large, heavy book. He dropped it on the table with a loud bang, and ran his fingers over the slightly raised lettering on the front.

“Human Physiology With Regard to Genetics and Heritability of Degenerative Conditions of the Eye’’

Hera blinked. A book? Who used books anymore? She reached for it, opened it somewhere in the middle, and read a few lines. She shook her head. “Kanan, this is incomprehensible,” she said.

“Try this,” he suggested, and handed her a datapad.

She switched it on to find it preloaded with more of the same, deep, complicated scientific information. Fascinating for a medical professional specializing in the field, she supposed, but for a kid struggling with a difficult diagnosis, or for the people that cared about him, not helpful at all.

“Believe it or not, Ezra’s actually read some of this stuff already,” Kanan told her. “He’s been studying up in secret.”

Hera felt her insides twist in pain at the thought of Ezra putting himself through that. She pushed the book and the datapad back toward Kanan. “I think we need to have a word with this droid. See if it has anything that’s actually useful it can give me to read. I need to know what accommodations we need to make, how fast we can expect it to progress, if there’s anything the droid can give him to make things easier now; help with reading, magnifying devices…” As she spoke, she checked off the points on her fingers. She glanced up; Kanan was smiling again. “What?”

“There’s the Hera I remember from my recovery,” he said. “Practical to a fault.”

“Shut up,” she told him. “And come on, we need to have a word with this N015. Bring those, we don’t need them.”

She got to her feet, stepped around the table and headed to the door. Kanan grabbed the book and the datapad, and followed after her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Listen, you pile of scrap metal,” she said, trying and failing to keep the anger out of her voice. “Kanan came here with Ezra, you know he has permission. If Ezra forgot to grant it officially, he’ll do it later, he won’t have a problem with this; we’re practically his parents.”
> 
> The droid turned its attention and its body in her direction. It cocked its head as though looking both herself and Kanan up and down, and then backed off a little further, as though to protect itself. “That is genetically improbable,” it said.

Hera hesitated at the door to the medical room.

It had been several months since she had been here last, but the memories were still fresh. It was there, by the examination table, that she had stood, Kanan’s fingers squeezing her hand that little bit too tightly, when she had brought him here after his return from Malachor. Over there, sitting on a hard chair near to the console interface, she had heard the droid inform Kanan that his sight would not return.

This room was full of bad memories, and for Kanan it had to be even worse.

She glanced at him, but he gave no outward sign of apprehension. Sensing her hesitation, he placed a hand on her arm and they stepped over the threshold into the room together.

The droid, a relatively new N01-model medical droid, looked up at them as they entered. It maneuvered itself around the computer terminal it had been positioned behind and approached them. “Welcome,” it said. “How can I be of assistance?”

Hera felt herself wince at the standard response to an approach from a patient. It would have said that to Ezra, just as it had to Kanan.

“It has been only five days, fifteen hours and seven minutes since your previous visit,” it continued, obviously speaking to Kanan rather than to her. “Such frequency is not required at this stage in your recovery. Have you been experiencing unusual symptoms?”

Kanan shook his head. “No, I…” He lifted the bag containing the medical book and datapad, and offered it in the droid’s direction. It made no move to accept it, and Kanan allowed the bag to drop back to his side. “We came to talk about Ezra.”

The droid emitted a barely perceptible humming sound as it searched its databanks, and then backed off the approximate distance of a step. “Ezra Bridger has not set up any alternative contacts for the discussion of medical issues,” it said.

Kanan grimaced. “No, I bet he didn’t. Wouldn't have wanted anybody finding this in his history if they went to check.”

“For that reason, I am unable to discuss the matter further and must terminate this conversation,” the droid continued. “Please obtain the necessary authorization, or attend with the patient.”

Hera stepped forward. “All we want to know…”

“Please obtain the necessary authorization, or attend with the patient in order to continue this discussion. I am sorry.”

“Wait,” Kanan said. “Ezra won’t mind this. Listen, all we want…”

“Please obtain the necessary authorization…”

Hera scowled, a surge of frustrated anger washing over her. Her hands bunched unconsciously into fists and she clenched them hard, as though she could beat the droid into compliance. The emotion was unfamiliar and unpleasant, out of control. Just like the whole situation -- completely out of her hands. There was nothing that she could do to stop what was happening to Ezra, but she could pry the information she needed out of the droid. Even if she had to pull out a wrench and take it apart to do so.

“Listen, you pile of scrap metal,” she said, trying and failing to keep the anger out of her voice. “Kanan came here with Ezra, you know he has permission. If Ezra forgot to grant it officially, he’ll do it later, he won’t have a problem with this; we’re practically his parents.”

The droid turned its attention and its body in her direction. It cocked its head as though looking both herself and Kanan up and down, and then backed off a little further, as though to protect itself. “That is genetically improbable,” it said.

Kanan’s hand closed around her forearm and squeezed gently. “Enno-fifteen,” he said. “We’re not looking for information specific to Ezra, we need general information about his condition. Specifically, what we can do to help him adjust.”

A metallic whirring sound again as the droid processed that new information. “I provided Ezra Bridger with ample reading material. You may find it useful to discuss with him what he has learned from that. However, if you wish for me to go over the pertinent points, I am more than willing.”

Kanan had tried to teach Hera to meditate once; it hadn’t exactly been successful. She took a deep breath and called on what she remembered to release some of her frustration as she exhaled. “The reading material isn’t exactly what I’d call relevant.”

“The information I provided to Ezra Bridger is the foremost literature available on the subject,” the droid told her. She wasn’t sure, but it actually sounded offended by the implication that it wasn’t useful.

At a loss as to how to proceed, she looked hopefully at Kanan. Sensing her scrutiny, he smiled in the droid’s direction. “What she’s saying is, we read the book. Now we need something else.”

The droid considered this carefully. “I’m aware that the Jedi are capable of a great many things; however, to my knowledge, reading visually without the use of one’s eyes is not one of them.”

Kanan grimaced. “Hera read it,” he lied. “Out loud. To me.”

The droid made that sound again as he considered this. It looked from Kanan to Hera and back again, and obviously made the decision not to pursue the argument any further. “I understand,” it said. “Could you give me an example of the further reading you would like to pursue?”

Hera folded her arms. “We need something that tells us about practical things we can do to help,” she said.

The droid dipped its head in an approximation of a nod. “Many adaptations made for Kanan Jarrus will be suitable to any other visually impaired person,” it said.

“Ezra… the theoretical person… he still has usable vision,” Kanan said. “He will for some time.”

The droid slid over to a large cabinet at the other side of the room, and reached inside for another datapad. He handed it to Hera. “I anticipated this conversation, and had this device pre-loaded with an appropriate text; however, it is short and rather simplistic,” it explained. “In addition to that, you will find that many of the adaptive technologies mentioned here are unavailable in our present location. No doubt you will find that frustrating. For that reason, I did not immediately provide this information.”

Hera turned on the pad and loaded up the ten-page booklet within. _A Guide to Vision Loss - How to Assist a Friend or Loved One._

“The text is also rather outdated,” the droid added. “I believe it dates back to the time of the Republic.”

Hera switched off the pad. “It’ll do,” she said. “Thank you.” She touched Kanan lightly on the arm, a signal to leave. He placed the bag containing the medical book on the desk, before turning and following her out of the room.

“What did he give you?” Kanan asked as they walked back to the Ghost.

Hera switched on the device and read the title word for word.

“Sounds interesting.” Kanan said. “I’ll look forward to you reading it to me.”

Hera laughed and shook her head. “Actually, that droid might be pedantic and more than a little annoying, but he thinks of everything. He’s pre-loaded the audio version of the book too.”

Kanan nodded. “Must have seen us coming,” he said.


	3. Chapter 3

On any other day, Ezra might have been enjoying the feeling of having nothing to do; it was a rare luxury to get a few hours to sit around doing nothing at all without having to feel guilty about others picking up the slack. Today was different. Today, having nothing to do gave his mind the opportunity to spin back and forth, replaying the conversation from earlier in the day, watching Hera’s reaction, over and over again.

Next time he had to have that particular conversation, he was going to make sure he had some mindless, menial task lined up for afterwards. That way he could disappear and lose himself in it, not think about anything for a while.

Of course, when it came down to it, the chances were pretty good that he would find himself right back here anyway, not doing anything. The last thing he felt like doing right now was work, even if he did think it might help.

He reached into the closet and pulled out the loth-cat plush given to him by Noisi, then climbed the ladder up to his bed. It was so soft; his fingers glided easily over the silky synthetic fur, and as he held it, it somehow appeared to grow warm, absorbing the heat from his own body until it felt almost as though he was petting a living, breathing creature. It looked perfect too, right down to the glass eyes that almost appeared to hold life behind them.

It was too soft, though. A real loth-cat only felt that soft as a kitten; once it grew to adulthood on the streets and on the grass plains of Lothal, its fur grew coarser and more wiry. This was a children’s toy, and that was why it was so embarrassing that this was the third time he had reached for it for comfort. He kept it hidden to avoid awkward questions or, more likely, mocking laughter from Zeb, but while Zeb was away, he could allow himself that.

Stupid droid. Why did it have to have come from him?

He held the toy a little tighter, and lay down on his side, staring out into the room but looking at nothing. His hands unconsciously worked at smoothing the already impossibly smooth fur. It didn’t help, not with the problem itself, not even with making him feel better about it. But it made him feel better in general. Even if just for a few moments.

Stupid droid.

The door opened unexpectedly. Ezra jumped in surprise, instinctively throwing the loth-cat behind his back and sitting up, adopting an nonchalant expression. Nothing to see here, certainly not Ezra lying on his bed hugging a toy. He relaxed incrementally when he realized that it was Kanan standing just outside his door. Well, at least he knew he hadn't seen the loth-cat. Of course, there was a good chance that Kanan would have known what he was doing from outside the room, and probably sensed the panicked attempt to hide it too.

He shuffled back slightly, adopting a more comfortable position with the toy still behind him; pulling it out again now would be too conspicuous anyway. "Oh, uh... Hey, Kanan." 

Kanan stepped inside the room, and waited for the door to close behind him before he responded.

He wasn’t wearing his mask, and although with the damage to his eyes it was difficult to see the exact direction of their gaze, they were open and, Ezra was sure, aimed right at him. Or, maybe a little to his left, but the effect was the same. “How are you doing?”

Ezra gave the question some serious thought. He wasn’t sure. He could feel the soft form of the loth-cat plush pressing into his lower back, and he was certain that Kanan knew it was there. He didn’t care. Except for that he did.

“Ezra?” Kanan asked.

He took a deep breath and released it as a sigh. “I’m fine,” he said.

Kanan looked unconvinced. Well, that was understandable; he was lying through his teeth, after all.

“Better, I guess,” he amended. “Than before, I mean. Not _better_ better, but…” At least it was done now. At least it wasn’t hanging over his head. Of course, on the flip side of the coin, it was done now, and Hera knew. Everything had changed after Kanan knew, everything was going to change even more now. But it had needed to be done, and now it was, and that had to be a good thing, right?

Right?

Kanan nodded, as though he was agreeing with the thoughts in his head. It wasn’t that, of course. Kanan could do a lot, but he couldn’t do that. A fact for which Ezra was eternally grateful.

“Where’ve you been, anyway?” Ezra asked.

Kanan took a step closer. “With Hera,” he said. “She had some questions, things she needed to talk about. Which you would have known if you hadn't decided to disappear without telling anybody."

He had known. That was part of the reason why he had left. That, and he had reached the point where he didn’t think he could take any more. The important bit was over and done with, he hadn’t needed to be there for the rest. “Wait, disappeared? Does that mean I managed to get out of there without you noticing?” He grinned at the achievement, but it faded quickly. Getting past Kanan was impressive, but on the other hand, what hope did Ezra have, if it was so easy to do that with someone as skilled as Kanan?

“Neither of us noticed,” Kanan told him. “In our defense, we were both a little distracted.”

Ezra smiled again despite himself. Kanan took the last couple of steps, turned and sat down on Zeb’s bunk, below Ezra.

‘So, what did Hera say?" he asked. "After I left, I mean.”

Kanan sighed deeply. “She’s…upset.”

That much he had known. That much he would have been able to assume even if he hadn’t been in the room at all, but the tears hadn’t gone unnoticed. She hadn’t even tried to hide them, not really. He had a feeling that that was going to be one of the worst things about this whole experience — well, other than the obvious, of course — being responsible for other people’s pain. Because he _was_ responsible, even if he had been given no choice in the matter.

He reached for the loth-cat again; the fact that Kanan was no longer standing in a position where he would have been able to see him made a difference, apparently. He placed it against his chest and squeezed it tightly with both arms, the soft fur tickled the skin of his lower face. He didn't say anything. He couldn’t see Kanan from where he was. His position, seated on the bunk below, shielded him from Ezra’s view, unless he decided to turn upside down and peer at him over the edge of his bed. He had been known to do that from time to time, with Zeb, but mostly not for any practical reason; just to be silly. He didn’t feel like being silly right now, and Kanan wouldn't be able to see it anyway.

Still, it was uncomfortable having a conversation with somebody he couldn’t see. He couldn’t decide whether that was something he had always felt, or a more recent development. If he had the energy, he would have climbed down from the bunk, but he didn’t, so he stayed put.

He was going to have to get used to that particular discomfort sooner or later, anyway.

“But what did she say?” he asked, after waiting an appropriate amount of time for Kanan to expand on his response.

Kanan hesitated before answering. “Nothing im…” He stopped. “The thing about Hera,” he said, “it’s not what she says that matters, it’s what she does.”

Ezra thought about that for a moment, but he wasn’t sure what exactly Kanan was getting at. Did he want him to ask? He loosened his grip on the loth-cat slightly as curiosity overrode his desire for comfort. “What did she _do_?”

“Nothing. Well, she… we… went to visit the med droid; she wanted more information.”

That… felt like a violation, somehow. If it had been anybody else, he would have been angry about that. As it was Hera… “Why didn’t she just ask me?”

“You? As in the person who had disappeared because he didn’t want to talk about it?”

“Or you?”

Kanan sighed again, and Ezra thought he could imagine the expression on his face — just irritated enough that it showed. “It’s not exactly my area of expertise. She’s looking for things that she can do to help.”

Ezra slumped slightly; if she had really thought there might be something, she would have been disappointed at what she discovered. His fingertips brushed the soft fur of the loth-cat’s head. “So, when she figured out there was nothing she could do..?”

Kanan didn’t respond for a moment; through the Force, Ezra detected the slightest hint of confusion from him, but it faded almost instantly as he understood the meaning behind Ezra’s words. “I didn’t mean… she wasn’t looking for a cure, she understands that. She wanted to find out what she could to to make things easier.”

He remembered that from before, from Kanan’s injury; the new rules she had instigated, keep the ship clear of any and all clutter, everything goes back in its proper place so that Kanan can find it, if Kanan needs help with something, help him without drawing attention to it. All that would be relevant one day, he supposed, but for now he didn’t want help, and he was okay with a little disorganization. He welcomed it, actually.

“Like what?” he asked.

“Magnifying glasses, large print, adaptive technology, stuff like that I guess.”

Right. Yeah, Kanan was right, definitely not his area of expertise. “Great,” he said. He hadn’t really meant to sound enthusiastic, but his tone of voice came out even more downcast than he had intended.

“It _will_ help,” Kanan assured him. “The thing with Hera is, she doesn’t like to be powerless. I know nobody does, but _she_ … if she can’t fix a problem, she has to find something to do to try to make it better. It’s how she copes.”

Ezra sighed. Whatever she was going to come up with, he would try it. He was already increasing the font size on his datapads, the idea of peering at something that he couldn’t alter through a magnifying glass was excruciating, but given the choice between that and not seeing it at all, it might be the least worst option. Anyway, Hera was nothing if not resourceful, she could probably come up with something better than that. Kanan was just guessing, after all.

“You… might find she acts differently around you now,” Kanan added.

Yeah, that was going to be a thing with everybody; tiptoeing around him, watching their words, feeling _sorry_ for him. He remembered seeing it with Kanan, now he was going to experience it from another angle. Subconsciously, he increased the speed of his hand stroking the loth-cat.

“Not like that,” Kanan said, appearing to read his thoughts again, but more likely filling in the gaps between what he could sense of Ezra’s emotions through the Force. “But she did change the way she acted around me. She… well, it’s not important right now. The point is, it helped. Most of the time. The rest… if it gets too much, you need to tell her.”

Ezra released his grip on the loth-cat and pushed it to the back of the bed. He shuffled forward slightly, allowing his legs around to hang over the edge of the bed, just next to Kanan’s left shoulder. Looking down, he could see him from above. Kanan sat facing out into the room, as though talking to an invisible someone. Which he was, in a way.

“What did she do?” he asked.

Kanan shrugged. “At first, she would talk. She told me everything, narrated it; what she was doing, the expressions on her own face, the weather, the color of the sky.” What little Ezra could see of Kanan’s expression appeared to be far away, lost in the past. “She touched me more, held my hand, touched my shoulder… like she wanted me to know she was there, like she thought I might forget because I couldn’t see her.”

“But you wouldn’t,” Ezra said, unnecessarily.

“No.” Kanan smiled. He couldn’t see it from where he sat above him, but he heard it in his voice. “But it helped her.”

Ezra couldn’t think of anything to say to that. He reached for the loth-cat again, hesitated, and then left it where it was.

“Come on,” Kanan said. He got to his feet and waited.

Ezra looked at him, puzzled. “Come on… where?”

Kanan shrugged. “Not sure yet, but anywhere is better than sitting around here with…” _The loth-cat._ “Your thoughts for company. Let’s take a walk."

He thought about it, seriously considered the offer, and decided against it. You didn’t take a walk with someone without talking, and any talk at the moment would necessarily come back to… that. Plus, there were any number of people out there that he considered friends; people that might come over to chat, and he wasn’t in the mood for that kind of a talk either. Interacting with anybody at all felt like it might be a bad idea right now.

He shook his head. “Thanks, but I have some stuff I should be doing.”

It was a lie, of course. He wished he had something to do. That way at least he could feel bad about sitting there for hours.

Kanan turned to face him. “What stuff?”

“Uh…” honestly, he had expected Kanan to let that go.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Okay, it doesn’t have to be a walk, but there’s no point wasting time, we might as well get some sparring practice in.”

He was trying to give him something to do, something to take his mind off things, some easy task, just physical enough to be tiring, just taxing enough that he had to concentrate on that instead, just easy enough that he would still be able to do it after the events of the day. “I know what you’re doing,” he said.

Kanan smiled. “You do? Great. Come on then.”

Ezra gave a mental sigh, and pushed off from the top bunk, landing easily on the floor below. Kanan didn’t wait for him as he turned back to the door and walked away, leaving Ezra trailing behind him.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her eyes fixed on something familiar on the bed next to him. Something large and furry with long, pointed ears and a wide mouth, covered in familiar markings. A tooka. A plush tooka; familiar for two reasons: her familiarity with the species in general, and the fact that Kanan owned an almost — but not quite — identical one. It had been presented to him by the med droid, N015, along with his prognosis.

Concentration eluded Hera as she tried to force herself to go about her business as normal. She would have been forgiven for taking a day off, passing the things that could be taken care of by somebody else on to a subordinate, and leaving the things that could not until she was better able to deal with them, but to do that would have raised questions. She was now a part of an exclusive club, and it wasn’t her place to bring others into the confidence.

Yet.

It would have to happen, and sooner rather than later. Sato would need to be made aware, at the very least. Sabine, Zeb, Rex… everybody? Maybe not everybody, not yet, but certainly anybody who might be working with Ezra in the coming months. After that, well, people talked. It was going to get out there sooner or later; and even if it didn’t, eventually it was going to be impossible to hide.

“… that way we wouldn’t need to install…” The young engineer stopped. “Captain Syndulla?”

Hera blinked, then shook her head. A stab of irritation struck her unexpectedly, irritation at herself, her reactions to this. She needed to be able to do her job, whatever was going on around her. She couldn’t allow herself to slip.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m listening.” She was annoyed at the implication that she hadn’t been paying attention. Or rather, at being found out.

The engineer cleared her throat. “Well, I was just saying, that way we would be able to boost power without the need to install bulky extra generators.”

“Great, do it,” Hera said, distractedly. Whatever it was, she trusted the engineers to know how to do their jobs; if they thought something would work, she wasn’t going to be the one to spot a flaw, certainly not from a brief outline. She turned and walked away.

What was Ezra doing right now, she wondered. Was he, like her, going through the motions, trying to act as though nothing was wrong? Probably. After all, he had been doing it for over a year already. She still couldn’t get her head around that idea; that he had been dealing with that, living with it _hiding_ it, for all that time. Since even before Kanan had lost his sight — and what must that have done to him? Watching Kanan deal, and for a time fail to deal, with that?

But Kanan had come out the other side. He was, for the most part, okay now. That gave her hope, Ezra would be okay too, and with Kanan to help him, with _all of them_ to help him… it was still going to be horrible. But at least they knew that it could be done; at least he had something to work toward.

It was hardly a consolation.

The sun was hanging low in the sky when she finally finished her day’s work, three mission briefings had been like torture, and she still needed to go over the next sections of Namah Neimi’s list looking for likely candidates for exploration. But that could wait.

She hurried back to the Ghost for the second time that day, this time with exhaustion gnawing at her slowly, making her body feel as heavy as her heart. As the door closed behind her, all she wanted to do was climb into bed and close her eyes, but she couldn’t do that.

The information given to her by the med droid waited in her quarters, and she needed to read it, she needed to do that before she even attempted to go over the list and find the best locations and crew for the next wave of missions.

But before any of those things, there was another, more important thing that needed to be done.

* * *

Hera’s fingers brushed the door chime to Ezra’s quarters. She waited a moment for a response, before opening the door and stepping inside.

Ezra lay on his back on his bunk, a datapad held above him, inches from the tip of his nose. Her stomach clenched at the sight; she had seen him reading like that before, and thought nothing of it. Now that she knew, many more things were beginning to take on new meaning, some of them probably coincidental, but many of them not. She should have noticed before. Or, if not realized what the problem was, at the very least she should have recognized that there _was_ a problem.

He held the datapad so that the light from the bulb by the bed hit it at the right angle, and appeared to be squinting slightly in order to read the text. He could have increased the size, of course. Most datapads came with that capability. Or, maybe he had done.

Actually, now she thought of it, hadn’t she switched one on not so long ago to find the font much larger than the standard? She had adjusted it back and thought nothing of it. Another thing that she should have noticed. Another way that she failed.

Ezra dropped the pad to his side and sat up as he turned to face her. “Oh, hey Hera,” he said with a pleasant smile.

He sounded entirely too normal. But then, she reminded herself, he was apparently an old hand at the game of pretense. Well, she knew how to play that game too, and if that was what he wanted, she was more than happy to oblige. After all, normality was going to go out the airlock soon, why not hang onto it for as long as they could?

“Hello,” she said with a tight smile. Her eyes fixed on something familiar on the bed next to him. Something large and furry with long, pointed ears and a wide mouth, covered in familiar markings. A tooka. A plush tooka; familiar for two reasons: her familiarity with the species in general, and the fact that Kanan owned an almost — but not quite — identical one. It had been presented to him by the med droid, N015, along with his prognosis.

She stared at it, eyes wide. In an instant, she was back in the medbay, Kanan holding the thing awkwardly, unsure what exactly he was supposed to do with it. His eyes had still been covered by a bandage then, and the burn was still new enough that when he woke up in the night it had been the actual pain, and not the memory of it, that had infiltrated his dreams.

If Ezra had one too, that made it real. More real somehow than the fact that he had told her, or the things that she was now noticing that corroborated the information. More real even than Kanan’s quiet explanation of Ezra’s mumbled words, or her visit to the droid today. That tooka represented something. The droid gave them out to a lot of its patients, but those ones, the realistic, beautiful crafted specimen carelessly slung on the bed beside Ezra, it reserved for the recipients of the most devastating news.

She wondered which programmer had thought that _that_ was a good idea. Or perhaps the idea had been the droid’s own, it wasn’t impossible. Either way, she couldn't imagine it ever had the desired effect, no toy would ever make up for a loss that great. Even if it did feel wonderful to hold.

For a moment, the tooka was all that she could see. She felt, rather than saw, Ezra turn to follow her gaze, his cheeks colored in that way that humans did when something embarrassed them, and he edged to the side slightly, as though to hide it from her view. Hera blinked, and forced herself to look at Ezra instead. “Tell me you haven’t been in here all day,” she said. She paused; she had sounded more irritated than she had intended, she had been going for concerned family member, but it had come out more like angry CO.

“No, I…” Ezra folded his arms defensively and shook his head. “Training. I’ve been training. With Kanan.” He frowned, and his color flushed a little darker. “Sparring,” he added. “Just normal… normal sparring.”

Hera nodded, but suddenly couldn't think of anything to say, anything that would fall within the realms of normal conversation, at least. How he was feeling, what he had done with the rest of his day, had he managed to force himself to eat anything at any point during the day — she hadn’t — would all come back to that inescapable fact.

Apparently sensing the awkwardness, or perhaps feeling it for himself, Ezra shifted uncomfortably on his bed, then slid off and landed on the ground. There were no seats in the room, the bed was the only place he could have sat, but Hera got the distinct impression that he was making a show of not being sick in bed. He leaned against the wall, looking a little uncomfortable.

“So, uh… do you know about the dokma races?”

She smiled, more out of relief than anything else. As a matter of fact, she did. She didn’t _exactly_ approve of it, inasmuch as it seemed cruel to keep the creatures in captivity, painted with markings to tell them apart and force them to race for the amusement of the base crew — mostly the mechanics, but others had recently gotten in on the action. On the other hand, methods of entertainment were few and far between, and they had to take their fun where they could get it. Blowing off steam was important; a stressed crew was an ineffective crew.

“No,” she said.

Ezra grinned widely, as though he was about to break the best news ever. “So, some of the mechanics started it, they’ve built a track behind the hangar bays, and they race them. There’s about ten of the things at the moment, but sometimes they swap them, let them go, catch new ones.”

Hera nodded. She hadn’t known that, actually. That made it a little better.

“They’re all marked with different colors, so we know which is which, and we race them. I mean, they mostly mill around, go backwards, refuse to move, but eventually they get the the end of the track and someone wins.”

Hera folded her arms and put on a disapproving face. “So, you _bet_ on them?”

“Yeah.” He frowned, catching the look. “Wait, is that bad?”

She almost laughed, but managed to keep the stern expression going for a full three seconds before a smile broke through. “As long as you don’t lose anything important.” _He was already doing that…_

She felt her smile falter a little, but Ezra appeared not to notice. His grin widened. “Couple of those really disgusting energy bars,” he said. “But I won two meilooruns and a bottle of pretty decent quality shampoo. I think I’m coming out on top.”

“Just make sure you keep doing that,” she told him.

“You could come sometime,” Ezra told her. “Little tip? The red one won the last three races.”

Hera laughed. “Thanks, but I don’t think anybody wants to hang out with the boss after hours.”

Ezra frowned. “I do.”

Hera opened her mouth to reply, but words escaped her again.

“I mean, it’s not like you’re Sato or something!” Ezra added, then cringed. “I mean… not that there’s anything _wrong_ with Sato, it’s just…” he shook his head. “Don’t tell him I said that, okay?”

She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and she didn’t know whether it was the talk of meilooruns, or the fact that for just a moment the nervous ball of stress in her stomach had dissipated, but suddenly she was hungry.

“You hungry? Want to come and get something to eat?” she asked. It was a good bet that he hadn’t had much himself today.

Ezra shrugged. “Sure, sounds like a plan. Then maybe to the dokma races?”

Hera laughed. “I’ll give it some serious consideration,” she promised.

“Oh, but just to warn you, there _might_ me some drinking there,” he added. “I mean, not me, obviously not me, but…” his cheeks turned pink again. “That’s okay, right? It’s not like anybody’s drinking on duty or anything…”

She sighed. This was exactly why she didn't get invites to that kind of an event, and exactly why she would be turning that particular invite down. “Gambling _and_ drinking?” she said in mock horror. “Yeah, I’m shutting that thing down first thing in the morning.”

Ezra still looked worried for a moment, then relaxed when he noticed the joking tone in her voice. “Very funny.”

Hera turned to leave. “I try,” she said. “By the way, those meilooruns you won, you don’t happen to still have them, do you?”

She heard Ezra open a cupboard, then close it again before he followed her out of the room. “One left,” he said as the door closed being them. “But I’m willing to share.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hera, finished the last mouthful of waffle and topped up both their cups from the dwindling supply in the pot. “Where did the waffles come from?” she asked. Rumor had it — a rumor that she was reasonably sure had been started and perpetuated by Ezra — that Zeb kept a secret supply somewhere on the Ghost. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed it, but she wouldn't put it past him.
> 
> “Don’t worry, Zeb’s secret stash remains to be discovered,” Kanan assured her.
> 
> She smiled. “That’s too bad, Ezra’s convinced he has an endless supply.”
> 
> Kanan shrugged. “Who needs endless waffles? I have jogan fruitcake, and enough caf to make a fresh pot, if you’ve got time?”

The scent of freshly-brewed caf permeated the air as soon as Hera opened the door of her quarters and stepped out into the corridor. It smelled like the real thing, not the rehydrated, freeze-dried granules that they usually had to make do with. The aroma was deep and intoxicating, and, still half asleep, she breathed in slowly and deeply, savoring it, before turning to trace the scent back to its origin.

She located the source in the lounge area, where she found Kanan placing a small plate piled high with what looked like fresh slices of meiloorun onto an already well-stocked table. She stopped in the doorway and stared, trying, and failing, to make sense of what she was seeing. She rushed quickly through several significant dates in her head, and found nothing that corresponded with the current day; birthdays, anniversaries, nothing. The next reason for a celebration was months away, and anyway, considering the events of the previous day, celebration was the furthest thing from her mind.

Kanan was already fully dressed and, judging by the contents of the table, had been hard at work for quite some time. He turned to face her with a hesitant smile, then carefully poured first one, and then a second, cup of caf from the pot. Steam rose from the cups as he did, and the aroma intensified.

“Right on time,” he told her.

“For…” Hera surveyed the scene before her for a second time, still trying to come up with a logical explanation for what she was seeing. Kanan had apparently done everything but hire a waiter. “…what?”

Kanan frowned. He indicated the table with a wave of one hand. “Breakfast,” he said. “I thought that much would be obvious.”

Two places had been set, each with an empty plate laying before a wide selection of fresh — not dried, not rehydrated and not even loaded with preservatives — food. Not a ration pack in sight; he had provided fruit, cereal, waffles with syrup on the side, caf of course, and, placed to the left of the table, like a jewel in the crown, two thick slices of what looked — and she had to look twice to make sure — like jogan fruitcake.

“What?” she said again, unable to think of any other way to articulate her confusion.

Kanan walked over to her, took her by the arm, and pulled her gently but insistently in the direction of the table. She sat down, still staring at the table in confusion.

She tried for a different question. “How? Where did you get all this?”

Kanan sat down opposite her. “I called in a few favors,” he said. “I might owe a few now too. Also, you’d be surprised what people will bet on the dokma races.”

Hera picked up her cup and wrapped both hands around it, feeling the warmth. She inhaled deeply. It had been a long time since she had had the genuine article. She took a small sip, and allowed the warm, dark liquid to roll over her tongue, savoring the taste. It had been almost as long since she had eaten a full meal of real food. Ration packs were fine, they provided all the nutrients they needed, but none of the flavor.

It was too bad it was all going to go to waste. As much as her mouth watered at the sight and smell of the banquet before her, the thought of actually eating anything was unappealing.

“What’s the occasion?” she asked.

Kanan helped himself to a bowl of cereal and added a splash of blue milk. “No occasion,” he told her.

It felt like an occasion. It felt like the meal should be in honor of some happy event, all of them crowded around the small table, sharing stories, laughing, eating until they couldn’t eat any more. She sipped her drink again. There was an occasion, it just wasn't one that either of them wanted to discuss.

“Eat something,” Kanan told her. He pushed the plate of meiloorun slices a little closer, then grabbed two for himself before moving his hand away.

She considered it. He had clearly gone to a lot of effort, it didn’t seem fair to reject outright his attempts at making her feel better. She picked up a slice of fruit and bit into it. It wasn’t half bad. A little tarter than the one she had shared with Ezra the night before, a little crunchier, like it could have done with another day to ripen, but still delicious. She took another slice and this time popped the whole thing into her mouth.

Kanan nodded approvingly, then swapped the bread with the fruit, placing it in front of her. She ignored it and watched Kanan eating, sipping occasionally at her drink.

“What about Ezra?” she asked, after a while. “It doesn't seem fair not to invite him.”

“Ezra doesn’t have any assigned duties this morning; by the time he crawls out of bed, you’d have been long gone. Anyway, at the rate you’re eating, there won’t be any shortage of food left for him.”

She thought of Ezra waking, entering the kitchen to find something to eat and finding the remains of a special occasion breakfast. What would he think? That they were happy? That they were _celebrating_?

“Why did you do this?” she asked.

Kanan frowned. “Did you eat anything yesterday?” he asked.

“Yes.” A ration pack for breakfast, before she had known anything was wrong — it seemed so strange that this time yesterday she had had no idea — and about a quarter of a meiloorun, shared with Ezra over a conversation about everything but the thing they should have discussed.

He reached across the table, placed two waffles on her plate and poured syrup over them, then picked up three slices of fruit and placed them on the top. Finally, he picked up her fork, and placed it in her hand. “I doubt it was much,” he told her. “You’re always so busy worrying about everybody else, you forget that you need to take care of yourself first. After all, if anything happened to you, the rest of us would fall apart. Not just our crew; Phoenix Squadron, the base, possibly the whole Rebellion.”

Simply because there was a fork in her hand and a plate of food in front of her, Hera broke off a piece of waffle with the side of the fork, speared it, and brought it to her mouth. The sweetness of the waffles and syrup contrasted well with the tartness of the fruit. She took another bite, and then another, and oddly, once she had started eating, her appetite returned. It didn’t help with anything else, but the exhaustion faded with the food in her stomach and the caf providing a much-needed energy boost. Suddenly, getting through the day ahead didn’t feel quite as insurmountable a task.

She glanced up from her almost empty plate. Kanan was smiling widely. She licked the syrup from her top lip. “What?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

She frowned, finished the last mouthful of waffle and topped up both their cups from the dwindling supply in the pot. “Where did the waffles come from?” she asked. Rumor had it — a rumor that she was reasonably sure had been started and perpetuated by Ezra — that Zeb kept a secret supply somewhere on the Ghost. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed it, but she wouldn't put it past him.

“Don’t worry, Zeb’s secret stash remains to be discovered,” Kanan assured her.

She smiled. “That’s too bad, Ezra’s convinced he has an endless supply.”

Kanan shrugged. “Who needs endless waffles? I have jogan fruitcake, and enough caf to make a fresh pot, if you’ve got time?”

Hera thought about it. She didn’t have anywhere she needed to be for another hour, but there was something she wanted to do; an idea that she had woken with. But to do that, she would need information, something more than the information that N015 had given her. Information that Kanan may be able to provide. “Sure,” she said.

Actually, she thought she might have agreed even if she had a pressing engagement. The possibility of fresh, real caf was simply too good to pass up.

***

“Is Ezra okay?” Hera asked, as she sipped her refilled cup.

Kanan paused, as though taken aback by the question. “I suppose that depends on what you mean,” he told her.

That was fair. She thought about it and realized that she didn’t know how to answer. She could tell for herself how he had been doing the previous night, when he had chattered endlessly about any-and-everything in what she assumed had been an attempt to block her from bringing up the one subject he didn’t want to discuss. He was coping, but that was likely because he was also probably in denial, or something like it. She didn’t _know_ but could guess the answer she would have gotten if her question had been in broader terms; how is he doing in general? Probably not well, but likely covering it enough that nobody noticed. Nobody but herself and Kanan, at least.

Really, she didn’t want to talk about how he was right now; she wanted reassurances about how he _would be_. She wanted Kanan to promise her that everything was going to be okay, whether that reassurance came as a promise that he had made a good start on teaching Ezra what he would need to know, or just a general promise that things would work out. She didn’t care whether it was sincere or not, she wanted that promise.

She knew better than to ask for it.

“Have you started teaching him anything?” she asked instead.

Kanan raised his cup to his lips and blew gently on the surface before taking a sip. His expression was far away and thoughtful. “Since I found out what was happening, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I do,” he said. “How I do it. It might sound strange, but I’ve never really thought about it before. Or, I _have_ , but not so much in words.”

That sounded like an admission that there had been no lessons. She pressed her lips together. “Okay.”

“I mean, it’s more of an instinctive thing, like how I don’t put much thought into the process of putting one foot in front of another; it’s an action that I do without having to analyze it. I probably _could_ try to articulate which muscles work in which order to let me take a step, or jump, or kick, or whatever else, but I doubt I’d be able to come up with an explanation that would make any sense to someone trying it out for the first time. Does that make sense? There’s a reason babies don’t learn to walk by listening to their parents’ instructions.”

Hera nodded. “You’re saying Ezra has to learn by doing.”

“Exactly.” Kanan reached for the plate containing the two slices of cake. She watched how he did it, hand moving in the right direction presumably by memory of where he had put that particular item, hand flat, palm down and low to the surface of the table, moving in a small arc until his fingers quickly located the plate, then lifting the slice of cake to his own plate. That was something that could be taught in words, she was sure of it. Not everything that Ezra would need to know would involve the Force.

“Isn’t that true of everything you teach him?” she asked. He hadn’t learnt how to manipulate objects using the Force, or how to fight with his lightsaber, by listening to Kanan lecture him. “You show him, he copies, he practices until he can do it. I’ve seen it.”

“That’s true,” Kanan agreed.

She frowned, confused. “Then…”

“The difference here is, to answer your last question; no, Ezra is not okay. He’s frightened, understandably so. He won’t admit it, of course, but he never does. He’s worried about what’s going to happen, about how he’s going to cope, he’s probably convinced that he’s never going to be able to do what he needs. Do you think it would be helpful to make him wear a blindfold and work out how much he _can’t_ do?”

Hera felt herself freeze, caught between the need to continue the discussion, and the equally-strong urge to run to Ezra’s quarters, let herself in, wrap her arms around him and never let him go. 

“I’m not saying we won’t get to that,” Kanan assured her. “It’s just that there are some things I want… I _need_ him to be able to do first. Some lessons that I may have neglected. A lot of Ezra’s training, I’ve focused on ways to use the Force to help in the fight against the Empire, there are other things that we haven’t spent as much time on as we should have, and it’s those things that are going to be most useful to him here.” He sighed, and looked so angry with himself with himself that she wanted to reach out and comfort him, tell him it was okay. “I should have done this before,” he added.

She didn’t ask what those things were that he needed to know; it wasn't important. All that mattered was that he was rectifying the situation now. Or planning to. “You didn’t know this was going to happen,” she told him. “You had no way of knowing.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. There are things I should have insisted on that I let slide because he found them boring. It was careless of me, as his master, not to give him that basic grounding.”

“Well, if it was,” Hera said, because of the two of them, she couldn’t claim to be the expert on the Jedi or the Force, “you’re fixing it now.”

Kanan rested his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, fingers running through his hair, massaging the scalp beneath. He sighed again, a frustrated growl. “You’re right,” he said. “I just really, really wish…” he tailed off, then lifted his head from his hands; his hair was out of place now, sticking up at odd angles where his fingers had pulled it loose from the band he used to tie it back. He shook his head as though shaking the thought out. “Never mind. You’re right.”

He still didn’t look entirely happy, but then nothing about what was happening was happy. Hera took a sip of her rapidly-cooling caf and took a slow, deep breath in. “Has he spoken to you about telling the others?” she asked. She found herself subconsciously dropping her voice to just above a whisper as she spoke, as though some random passerby might overhear them and inquire as to what they were talking about.

Kanan frowned, clearly troubled by the question. “Not exactly,” he said. He lowered his voice slightly too, as though to match her tone. “He knows it’s something he’s going to have to do, he also doesn’t want to do it, so I have a feeling he’s going to try to put it off for as long as possible.”

That was what she had been afraid of. “Sato needs to know,” she said.

Kanan’s expression grew unreadable as he absorbed her words. “Not yet,” he said.

“He’s the one that’s ultimately responsible for everyone on this base. If someone’s having an issue that might affect their ability to do their job, he needs to be made aware of it.”

“It’s not affecting…” Kanan frowned and shook his head. “You’re right. And I said something very similar to Ezra about you, ahead of the mission you wanted to send him on. He told me it wasn’t an issue, and I said it could be. Why am I now taking the opposite side?”

Hera smiled and shook her head. “I guess you’re feeling protective. Or maybe you just like to argue.”

Kanan nodded and smiled good-naturedly. “I do enjoy a good argument. Why do you think I joined the Rebellion in the first place?”

“And there I was, thinking it had something to do with me.”

He laughed. “It did. You’re the one I like to argue with? But seriously, it doesn't have to be now, does it? Give him a little time to tell Sabine and Zeb at least, before we bring anybody else into it. They’ll be back in a few days, what harm will that do?”

She considered it. Probably none. There were no missions on the horizon anyway, at least not for Ezra, or for the Ghost crew in general; and as far as she could tell, Ezra’s vision wasn’t so bad that it was going to become a major issue if there were.

She took a deep breath. “He needs to tell them at the first possible opportunity,” she said. “As soon as he’s done that, I’ll have a word with Sato. If doesn’t have to go any further than that for now, but he needs to be aware that eventually other people are going to have to know.”

“Eventually, other people are going to notice,” Kanan added. “But yeah, he knows they’re going to have to be informed before that.”

Hera nodded. “So, we’re expecting Sabine and Zeb to be gone for just under a week. As soon as we receive a communication that they’re en route, he needs to be preparing to tell them.”

Kanan frowned. “You’re not going to have him meet them off the ship and tell them about it there and then, are you?” Despite the joking tone in his voice, she could hear genuine concern, as though he actually believed that she might make Ezra do that.

“No,” she said quickly. “But that day. Or night, whenever they get home. Give them time to get settled, then call a meeting.”

Kanan visibly relaxed. He genuinely had been worried that she wanted Ezra meeting them as the doors to the Phantom opened, and making his announcement. It would be funny, if the situation wasn’t so very _not_ funny. She felt a pang of sympathy for everybody involved. Talking about it had clearly been difficult for Ezra, and for Kanan too, to a lesser extent. But Sabine and Zeb, they had no idea. They were going to return from their mission, probably in high spirits and with a stack of carefully embellished stories to tell, and this news was going to crush all that. It was going to crush _them_. And there was nothing that she could do to make it easier.

She sighed, resting her head in her hands. She had work to do, but work was the furthest thing from her mind right now. “What if I made a data file?” she asked.

Kanan frowned, clearly confused by the sudden leap in conversation. “Okay?” he said.

“With information about this Sacul Syndrome thing,” she clarified. “Something a bit more readable than the scientific texts the droid can provide. Maybe a bit of info more specific to Ezra too, some of the relevant stuff from the pamphlet the droid gave me about how to help… I don’t know. Just something we can give to Sabine and Zeb, maybe the others too, if we need to. It might help.”

Kanan’s frown deepened slightly. He didn’t reply.

“That was the first thing I wanted,” Hera told him. “And it’s not something that existed. I didn’t… I still _don’t_ want to have to ask Ezra that stuff, but if I can, I could save him from having to answer the same questions over and over, and Sabine and Zeb wouldn’t have to worry about how to get the answers they’re looking for. It would help everyone.”

Kanan looked thoughtful for a moment. “It _might_ ,” he said. “I’m just wondering how Ezra would feel about you handing something like that out to people.”

“I think it’d make things easier for him,” she said. But Kanan was right, Ezra might not see it that way.

“It probably would,” Kanan told her. “I’d still ask him about it first, make sure he’s okay with it before you spend hours working on it, because I have to admit, I’m not sure I’d enjoy being the subject of something like that. Would you?”

She thought about it. No, she probably wouldn’t, but she would probably agree to it anyway. It was better than the alternative. “I need to talk to Ezra anyway, I need these answers whether I’m writing them down or not, I need to know, Sato’s going to want to know. I’ll ask him how he feels about the file at the same time.”

“Just, go easy on him, okay?” Kanan said. 

She thought of Ezra the previous day, of his hesitancy, his obvious terror, his inability to even get out the words that he needed to say. She could understand Kanan’s protectiveness. She shared it. That was why the file would help. But Kanan was right, only if Ezra agreed.

“I will,” she promised.

“Seriously. These questions you want him to answer, don’t get all ‘Captain Syndulla’ on him.”

She had heard the joke around the base, that Hera Syndulla was actually two people: the first, warm and friendly, the second all business, and terrifying with it. She never thought she would hear that from Kanan. She felt herself scowl at him, for all the good it would do, and she got to her feet. “I’ll see you later,” she said. “Captain Syndulla has duties she needs to perform.”

She turned and left the room, the now almost-cold cup of caf still half full on the table.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments feed the author.


End file.
